The selective destruction of an individual cell or a specific cell type is often desirable in a variety of clinical settings. For example, it is a primary goal of cancer therapy to specifically destroy tumor cells, while leaving healthy cells and tissues intact and undamaged.
An attractive way of achieving this is by inducing an immune response against the tumor, to make immune effector cells such as natural killer (NK) cells or cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) attack and destroy tumor cells. CTLs constitute the most potent effector cells of the immune system, however they cannot be activated by the effector mechanism mediated by the Fc domain of conventional therapeutic antibodies.
In this regard, bispecific antibodies designed to bind with one “arm” to a surface antigen on target cells, and with the second “arm” to an activating, invariant component of the T cell receptor (TCR) complex, have become of interest in recent years. The simultaneous binding of such an antibody to both of its targets will force a temporary interaction between target cell and T cell, causing activation of any cytotoxic T cell and subsequent lysis of the target cell. Hence, the immune response is re-directed to the target cells and is independent of peptide antigen presentation by the target cell or the specificity of the T cell as would be relevant for normal MHC-restricted activation of CTLs. In this context it is crucial that CTLs are only activated when a target cell is presenting the bispecific antibody to them, i.e. the immunological synapse is mimicked. Particularly desirable are bispecific antibodies that do not require lymphocyte preconditioning or co-stimulation in order to elicit efficient lysis of target cells.
Several bispecific antibody formats have been developed and their suitability for T cell mediated immunotherapy investigated. Out of these, the so-called BiTE (bispecific T cell engager) molecules have been very well characterized and already shown some promise in the clinic (reviewed in Nagorsen and Bäuerle, Exp Cell Res 317, 1255-1260 (2011)). BiTEs are tandem scFv molecules wherein two scFv molecules are fused by a flexible linker. Further bispecific formats being evaluated for T cell engagement include diabodies (Holliger et al., Prot Eng 9, 299-305 (1996)) and derivatives thereof, such as tandem diabodies (Kipriyanov et al., J Mol Biol 293, 41-66 (1999)). A more recent development are the so-called DART (dual affinity retargeting) molecules, which are based on the diabody format but feature a C-terminal disulfide bridge for additional stabilization (Moore et al., Blood 117, 4542-51 (2011)). The so-called triomabs, which are whole hybrid mouse/rat IgG molecules and also currently being evaluated in clinical trials, represent a larger sized format (reviewed in Seimetz et al., Cancer Treat Rev 36, 458-467 (2010)).
The variety of formats that are being developed shows the great potential attributed to T cell re-direction and activation in immunotherapy. The task of generating bispecific antibodies suitable therefor is, however, by no means trivial, but involves a number of challenges that have to be met related to efficacy, toxicity, applicability and produceability of the antibodies.
Small constructs such as, for example, BiTE molecules—while being able to efficiently crosslink effector and target cells—have a very short serum half life requiring them to be administered to patients by continuous infusion. IgG-like formats on the other hand—while having the great benefit of a long half life—suffer from toxicity associated with the native effector functions inherent to IgG molecules. Their immunogenic potential constitutes another unfavorable feature of IgG-like bispecific antibodies, especially non-human formats, for successful therapeutic development. Finally, a major challenge in the general development of bispecific antibodies has been the production of bispecific antibody constructs at a clinically sufficient quantity and purity, due to the mispairing of antibody heavy and light chains of different specificities upon co-expression, which decreases the yield of the correctly assembled construct and results in a number of non-functional side products from which the desired bispecific antibody may be difficult to separate.
Given the difficulties and disadvantages associated with currently available bispecific antibodies for T cell mediated immunotherapy, there remains a need for novel, improved formats of such molecules. The present invention provides bispecific antigen binding molecules designed for T cell activation and re-direction that combine good efficacy and produceability with low toxicity and favorable pharmacokinetic properties.